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Bauer, Lina

University of British Columbia

English Language Learners (ELLs) are sequential bilingual children who speak a minority language at home and learn English through school programs. ELLs are more likely than monolingual children to be under- or over- diagnosed with Developmental Language Disorder, a language disorder of unknown biomedical origin. This study aims to describe the range of abilities of ELLs on language-based measures in English thereby providing benchmarks to identify children who are not performing as expected. Narrative macrostructure and nonword repetition were of interest as performance on these measures seems to be less specific to a given language. Chinese-English ELLs completed a story retell, analyzed for macrostructure and microstructure, and a nonword repetition task in Grade 2 (N = 75) and Grade 3 (N = 68). Parent report and English Language Learning (ELL) teacher evaluations provided information about the child’s first language development history and current second language abilities. Speech-Language Pathologists (SLPs) reported which children had been referred to them for suspected language difficulties. In line with developmental expectations for monolinguals, the ELLs used a variety of story grammar elements and showed emergence of mental states in their stories. Results from the language measures were generally consistent with ELL teacher evaluations and SLP report but also identified other children who may require additional supports. Macrostructure seemed to be a stronger indicator of low language proficiency in Grade 2 than Grade 3. Not all microstructure measures were equally informative in this Chinese-English sample. Length of exposure to English was not related to macrostructure scores. The findings further our understanding of typical language characteristics of Chinese-English sequential bilinguals. In line with prior research, results suggest that narrative macrostructure reflects language skills that are less language specific and, when supplemented with other data, holds promise for identifying bilingual children with a language disorder. Moreover, macrostructure could contribute to identifying children who would otherwise be missed. Evaluating Chinese-English bilingual children using English monolingual norms for verbal fluency and grammatical accuracy could misidentify these children with a language disorder. ELL teacher evaluations may be useful to screen for children who require further evaluation.

Text

2024-04-29

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/88043

Audiology and Speech Sciences

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/